Digital Painting in Photoshop

Digital Painting in Photoshop

Language: English

Pages: 256

ISBN: 0240811143

Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub

Have you ever considered using Photoshop to create fine art?

Photoshop is usually used for enhancing photos, but this extremely powerful software package is capable of so much more. Every feature, from brushes to background, can be customised and optimised for artistic effect. With a little guidance from a pro, your photoshop results can go from competent retouching of images to visually stunning re-interpretations of them, turning everyday pictures into breathtaking works of art.

In this beautiful and inspiring book, acclaimed artist, author and lecturer Susan Bloom shows you how to do just that. Starting with the fundamentals: creating your own artistic brushes and textured papers virtually, she goes on to demonstrate how to create a variety of classic artistic styles in Photoshop, with chapters on watercolours, pastels, charcoal and oil. Further chapters cover illustration techniques in photoshop, and using third-party software to create painterly effects.

While the results are highly polished and realistic, this is not a book written specifically for artists. The techniques are aimed squarely at the Photoshop user looking to broaden their pallette, with emphasis on altering photographs to create artwork, rather than creating artwork from scratch.

Beautifully written, clearly laid out, and guaranteeing inspiring results, this book is a must-have for every Photoshop user.

is indeed the premiere program for these tasks. But have you ever thought about painting in Photoshop? I don’t mean running your image through the Watercolor Filter, expecting a watercolor painting to emerge in seconds. I mean making brush strokes that are truly painterly. Photoshop contains hidden tools that are perfect for painting. Like many hidden things, they are actually right there in plain view. It is like the experience of shopping for a particular make of car. Once you begin

as tight curl, loose medium, dab, and tight short. It pulls color information from the photo you opened. In essence, it is using the photo as your clone source and depositing a particular looking brush stroke on another layer. 124 Painting with Watercolors in Photoshop FIG. 5-25 Capri rowboat made with Pattern Stamp tool. 125 Digital Painting in Photoshop For our example here, we are going to use the dab brush stroke, which resembles pointillism, a style of art popularized by

the layers and hit Command ϩ Option ϩ E for the Mac or Ctrl ϩ Alt ϩ E on the PC. Shadow accent colors were added on a new separate transparent layer. (Note that the layer is made opaque in this illustration so we can better view it. It is really on a transparent layer; a checkerboard pattern identifies a transparent layer.) 145 Digital Painting in Photoshop FIG. 6-7 Merged layer with Hide all Mask. FIG. 6-8 Shadow accent colors added. A basic color concept is exaggerated with the addition of

strokes match the contour of the object, like you are massaging the pear with your hands. In this technique all the strokes are applied in one step and raised or embossed all at once. Use Filter – Stylize – Emboss on the white painted stroke layer. The height was set to 6 pixels. Note that more pixels will result in a higher emboss. The light creating the emboss shadow was directed at an angle of 135 degrees. The Blending Mode was set on Linear Light for this emboss layer. This particular